Self-Care

A Globe and Mail Fall Book of 2025

An electric examination of women and men, sex and love, self-loathing, and twenty-first-century loneliness.

Between writing a weekly column for The Hype Report and managing her mood stabilisers, Gloria navigates a series of quasi-relationships while commiserating with her best friend about dating apps and inappropriate pictures, married men, and questionable boundaries. However, when she makes a glib pass at Daryn, a stranger on a subway platform crowded with young anti-immigration protesters, and finds him waiting for her outside her health club a couple of days later, a surprising curiosity leads her not to consider a restraining order, but to talk to him.

Claiming she wants to interview him for an article on the incel movement, Gloria meets Daryn for coffee and soon invites him back to her apartment—where his earnestness and painfully restrained desire inspire her to dominate him sexually. As their physical relationship intensifies, so does their emotional connection, and Gloria can't shake the sense that she's headed in a dangerous direction.

Self-Care is a devastating novel about women and men, what they want and what they say they want, and the violent tension between the two.